Archbishop Chaput: SUBJECT TO THE GOVERNOR OF THE UNIVERSE: THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE AND GLOBAL RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

+Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. Archbishop of Denver
Berkley Center, Georgetown University
3.1.11

Excerpt:
Principles that Americans find self-evident — the dignity of the human person, the sanctity of conscience, the separation of political and sacred authority, the distinction between secular and religious law, the idea of a civil society pre-existing and distinct from the state — are not widely shared elsewhere. In fact, as Leszek Kolakowski once said, what seemed self-evident to the American Founders ―would appear either patently false or meaningless and superstitious to most of the great men that keep shaping our political imagination.‖iii We need to ask ourselves why this is the case.

We also need to ask ourselves why we Americans seem to be so complacent about our own freedoms. In fact, nothing guarantees that America‘s experiment in religious freedom, as we traditionally know it, will survive here in the United States, let alone serve as a model for other countries in the future. The Constitution is a great achievement in ordered liberty. But it‘s just another elegant scrap of paper unless people keep it alive with their convictions and lived witness.

Yet in government, media, academia, in the business community and in the wider culture, many of our leaders no longer seem to regard religious faith as a healthy or a positive social factor. We can sense this in the current administration‘s ambivalence toward the widespread violations of religious liberty across the globe. We can see it in the inadequacy or disinterest of many of our news media in reporting on religious freedom issues. And we can see it especially in the indifference of many ordinary American citizens.

In that light, I have four points that I‘d like to share with you today. They‘re more in the nature of personal thoughts than conclusive arguments. But they emerge from my years as a Commissioner with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and I believe they‘re true and need to be said. The first three deal with the American experience. The last one deals with whether and how the American experience can apply internationally. the rest